Just another patch with nothing in it that peaks my interest in a good way.
Object 279 just should not be in the game, end of story. At least they managed to not create magic russian sidearmor on it, which is something, I guess.
Don't care for Minsk, yet another city-map and a wannabe city-map for all classes like Paris, which is a complete clusterfuck and Studzigythianki will be just as bad for exactly the same reasons.
Map reworks are meh. Province being a terrible map for high tiers was obvious for all the painful reasons the original map was scrapped to begin with, so yet another sign for the deciders just not knowing what they do. Mines, ok, needed a change, gonna see if it is good or not. Rest I feel are benefitting the wrong tanks, given the descriptions and what I've seen so far. Mountain Pass still is a fucking camping shitshow and not even being touched yet again for the umpteenth time. Pilsen rework might be mildly interesting.
New polish tanks, don't care, don't want to grind them, I want the tanks in existence to be rebalanced.
As for the new personal mission chains, gonna see if they are good for anything, but I just suspect another time-hog which leads to the worst players having access to the new tanks far before any reasonable player can have them. So meh.
P.S.: Fuck the 279. Yet another promise broken. And nobody cares or raises a fuzz. Yet another sign of how the community degraded by so many of the old timers and good players having gone off and what's left is an apathetic mass of which I am part still, for all the wrong reasons.

I think the Churchill I is probably in a decent place, where the armor helps against lower tiers and the gun is good enough to deal with not being top tier. Biggest problem is probably a lack of top speed. Beyond that, Churchill VII is just a mess in absolutely every regard. Black Prince, despite being workable initially, wasn't in a good place since it's introduction and it only got worse over time with power creep, superheavies and MM-changes.
Churchill VII is by far the worst. Even after they changed it's armor layout, it's still riddled with weakspots, it's by far the least mobile of the three and has the weakest gun in relation to tier, basically retaining the exact same gun the Churchill I had. Black Prince suffers a lot, but it outpaces, outarmors and outguns the Churchill VII by quite a margin and back before you absolutely needed 200+ pen as a T7 tank, the gun was good enough to get the job done except for either needing more alpha or more DPM (remember, the 17 pounder is on par with the D25T in terms of penetration and I can't remember anyone ever complaining about the IS1 and IS2 lacking in penetrative power). Superheavies and power creep changed that, but that doesn't exactly improve the Churchill VII either.
What riles me up is people behaving as if that is a normal or even just an acceptable state of things (when it so clearly isn't, both economically and in terms of player retention/game enjoyment), which your statement and hall0's read like to me. It's defeatist, self-defeatist and it validates WG's behaviour, which all is wrong on just too many levels to leave it uncommented. Sorry if that wasn't your intention.
Drop the 17 Pounder onto the Churchill VII, increase top speed by 5 and give it a 600hp engine (alternatively, give it a 450hp engine and drop those ground resistances to some silly level). Maybe fix some of the frontal armor holes, to make it a "light superheavy" (for lack of a better word). Done.
Black Prince, +5 top speed, Centurion turret (the more sturdy variant), 20 pounder A-barrel, reintroduce 20 pounder A- and B-barrel as a secondary gun on the Caern (to smoothen the line's transition, because fuck the 17 pounder on a T8 heavy - and i say that as someone who loves that gun), 750hp engine or retain current engine with silly low ground resistance. Done.
Suddenly you have a progression in that line, instead of the side-grade that the Churchill VII is to the Churchill I and the Black Prince being a T7 tank with a T6 medium gun. It really isn't rocket science.

No. Just, No. This is a terrible stance to take. Having mediocre tanks in any line is fine, after all, not everyone can be the top dog in a given class and tier, but having just plain shitty tanks in a line is terrible design, much worse if it's multiple terrible and sub-par tanks. It may entice people to spend FreeXP and thus might be economically good for the company, but it hurts the overall game-balance, taking possible tank-variety away and narrowing choices down, not to talk about how people feel that would normally like a given tank and play it all day if it were any good. Plus it also invalidates the work the company spend on developing said tank. If it's designed as a pure FreeXP-hog, then they might as well remove the tank and just increase the research cost for the tank following it.

I'll quote myself, as words make a difference when they are actually heard or read:
Note, I didn't write "flawless" or "perfect" or "masterful" or anything to that degree. I am quite aware that T10 balancing isn't a done business by any stretch of the imagination, but at least there's balancing there. The same can't be said for T8 vs T10 or T7 vs T8 or even, in many cases, T8 vs T8.

Truth be told, I rarely saw an issue in being the bottom tier in the old match-making. Few things gave me as much glee and fun as wrecking tanks that were supposedly superior to mine, because back in the day, you generally still could deal with top tier tanks' better performance parameters thanks to skill and knowledge (of weakspots mainly).
I've come back to playing the Chi-Ri for a bit recently and this tank is a good example of that phenomenon. 57% Winrate in it over a length of 227 matches. Mostly by playing it back in the day when the first iteration of Pearl River was still a thing, along with a today-rarely-seen friend of similar skill-level to mine (fuck reallife, really). We knew where to shoot and despite the many drawbacks and weaknesses of the tank, it wasn't unplayable as long as you knew what you were doing. Today though? No chance. The maps don't regularly give you the opportunity to ambush and outmaneuver the enemy anymore. It's a front to front slug-fest for the most part and here two, maybe three things count: Penetration, frontal armor and alpha. None of which the Chi-Ri offers, few to no ways to let skill compensate for raw number-advantages thanks to map-design, which puts it even further back and then you have to consider the tier differences and super-heavies on top of that. Tier progression was bad in the day already, but it only got worse between powercreep and abandoned balancing-attempts. Not even all T8s are on equal footing yet, about two years after they started to balance the T10s more properly to each other.
Same for the 59-16. I fucking three-marked that thing with the autoloader, simply because I had fun driving the tank and I never felt overwhelmed by the enemy tanks even if I had to drive behind them and ended up on maps like Ensk all day. In fact, some of my most memorable games in the little pest were on Ensk and Himmelsdorf, as the lowest tier tank in the match. Today? It has a better gun, better mobility, technically less punishing matchmaking and still, you just can not do anything good in it. In fact, driving a light tank is one of the most sure-fire ways to actually loose a battle. Just WTF?! I had more influence on the outcome of the battles when I was three tiers below the top tier tank for crying out loud... What is wrong with you, WarGaming?!
It's just a giant shitshow and it gets worse the longer they drag their feet about the glaringly obvious issues of the game and I am willing to bet, that 3-5-7 wouldn't be half as bad as it is, if they had come around and fucking balanced the entire line-ups better and not half-arsed it so badly. That it takes the better part of a year to even begin balancing the T8s after they powerbuffed T10 and T9 left and right was bad enough already. That they haven't come down to T1 after over two years, considering that this is where the long-term player-retention begins, is beyond belief. That they haven't even made it down to T7 by now, is just... I am at a loss of words.

I've been wondering this since they talked about it the first time and here it is again: At first I thought it's all pref-MMs, but then the narrative always only focused on the T8-pref-MMs without ever mentioning the other pref-MMs. Why is it only the T8 pref-MMs that are "a problem for the matchmaker"? So disingenious. Just yet another sign that the matchmaker was and is the problem, not the tanks.

Nineteen signs: Panzergranate 40/42
But that is besides the point, as I said "most sensible", not "most powerful".
If it became reality, I would expect it to become a gun for the regular tank. The Chi-Ri is in dire need of help with the recent changes. It never was a particularly good tank, but it performed well in an assault-support role and two of them played in a good platoon were something you'd not want to fight, despite it's poor reaction-speed (I managed a 57.27% winrate in it, playing mostly in a two-man Chi-Ri platoon with someone of comparable skill to me). Removal of weak-spots, introduction of new vehicles which are faster, better armored and better armed all at the same time and general matchmaking changes absolutely killed what little viability this tank had though. But just giving it an 88 wouldn't fix it. It would just become an inferior copy of the italian T7 med. Taller, less effective armor and less mobility.
Yes they did, but it was not in wide-spread use. As Haswell pointed out correctly, there was just no need to have that kind of ammo in common stock, as the Japanese didn't generally deal with anything beyond what a Sherman could offer. It's easy to forget, that the Sherman and the Tiger I had almost the same armor and anything that could deal with either of these tanks, wouldn't have a problem dealing with Valentine IIs, Matildas and even Churchills.

Actually the japs faced two of the three named ones and were about to face the third, if the war had gone on just 2 more months. Either way, the "top dog" 75mm anti tank gun of the japanese was more than good enough to deal with any of these tanks. It had comparable performance to the german Pak/KwK 42 (aka 75/L70), you know, the gun featured on the Panther, argueably the most sensible (anti-) tank gun of the war (yeah yeah, the PaK/KwK 43 aka 88/l71 had greater penetration, shell velocity and explosive mass, but the gun was considerably more expensive and also much more maintenance demanding).

They've convinced themselves, that their failing is in fact a proof of their superiorty. The game is rigged against them, thus they loose and the game wouldn't be rigged against them if they were a bad player, so they must be good. To walk away from that would mean acknowledging what a giant fuckup one is to one's own ego.

Until about a year ago, I loved playing light tanks and scouted a lot. I had a phase where I barely played the game in randoms for about a year and now am back doing randoms a lot, trying to do what I thought I was good at. The results were rather mixed and today something hit me like a brick, when playing the HD'd Fisherman's Bay specifically. Is it just me or did a lot of the bushes shift from forward positions where they can be used to scout early or from positions where you can use them to crouch towards the enemy, to rear positions where they are completely useless for scouts but tremendously useful for TDs? And it seems to be the same for a number of maps: Active scouting seems to be the only form of scouting still viable at all. What's your impression?